The Abbot, says St. Benedict, is believed to hold the place of Christ in the monastery, since he is addressed by a title of Christ, as the Apostle indicates: You have received the spirit of adoption of sons by which we exclaim, Abba! Father! (HR 2:2; Rm 8:15).
I recall when I first saw this text from the Holy Rule: I thought it rather odd. The Abbot holds the place of Christ, because he is called by Christ’s name, when we address him as Father. Well: I’d never thought of calling Christ Father, or of deriving a theology of monastic obedience from the use of that title. The supporting text St. Benedict quotes here from Romans doesn’t seem to help much. St. Paul is evoking precisely Christ’s spirit of sonship, which all Christians are called to share. When we cry to God “Abba, Father!”, we do so through the Holy Spirit, through whom we enter the relationship Jesus has with God his Father. How then can we take that cry as addressed to Jesus himself, and then use it to justify our monastic use of the word “Abbot”?
A bit of research though shows that the idea of Christ’s fatherhood was quite commonplace amongst the Fathers of the Church. We find it in very early Acts of the Martyrs, in St. Irenaeus, and in Origen. From Origen it was picked up by the Alexandrian Fathers, by the monastic fathers of the Egyptian desert, such as Evagrius, and then in the Latin West by SS. Ambrose, and Jerome, and Augustine. So St. Benedict was certainly not being eccentric, or unorthodox here. Rather curiously the idea has re-emerged, in somewhat different form, in our own time, in discussions about Christ’s gender. Why was Jesus male? Does his male-ness matter? Did he have to be male? Among the answers commonly given are that Christ had to be a man in order appropriately to represent his Father, to mediate his Father, to be an image of his Father, to reveal his Father. He had to be male also as Bridegroom and Spouse of his Church. As such also, at least in some sense, we can see him as “father” of the Church’s children.
In St. Matthew’s Gospel on one occasion Jesus told his disciples: Call no man your Father (Mt 23:9). He was pointing there, as he habitually did, to God his Father in heaven, to God who alone is Father in an absolute sense. But the intention of Jesus cannot have been merely restrictive here. Rather, in Jesus we can see how human fatherhood, whether natural or spiritual, is not only relativised, but also dignified, elevated, blessed by deriving from, by participating in, the Fatherhood of God. All fatherhood in heaven and on earth takes its title, says St. Paul, from God the Father (cf. Eph 3:15). So Paul goes on boldly to claim the title of Father for himself. I begot you in Christ Jesus by means of the Gospel, he tells the Corinthians (1 Cor 4:15), and he writes to the Thessalonians: Like a Father with his children we exhorted each one of you (1 Thess 2:11).
St. Benedict very strongly desires the relationship he has with his monks to be as a Father with his sons. Listen, my son, he begins: ... this is advice from a loving father. His title as “Abbot” evokes the charismatic fathers of the Egyptian desert, who were all called “Abba”. He demands obedience, but that is a service to the brethren, very much in their interest. Because “the obedience which is offered to Superiors is given to God, as he himself said: He who hears you, hears me” (cf. Luke 10:16; HR 5:6 & 15). At the end of his Rule St. Benedict asks that “the brethren love their Abbot with sincere and humble charity” (HR 72:10). Today we delight to profess our love for St. Benedict in this way, and to rejoice that he remains our father: strong, reliable, stable; ever freshly inspiring; ever newly life-giving, even after all these centuries.
Nowadays it’s difficult to be a father. In modern secular culture the whole concept of fatherhood tends to be loaded with negative connotations. Fathers are regarded as superfluous, unnecessary, irrelevant; or often they’re portrayed as domineering, oppressive, even abusive. But children and families need fathers, and we see a largely fatherless society all around us simply falling apart.
Thank God then for St. Benedict our father! He is such in the first place as begetter. At the origins of our way of life, he generates spiritual children for Christ. These children find that following St. Benedict helps them in their quest for union with Christ. They feel secure under his protection, and he does not let them down. Among them all we recognise a certain family resemblance; all variety of character, temperament, background and culture notwithstanding. There is a mind-set, a way of being, thinking and acting, an instinctive way of going about things that is peculiarly, or properly Benedictine. I know that there are other religious and spiritual families within the Catholic Church, and some of them are very good ones. But personally I never want to be anything other than a son of St. Benedict! And while we’re at it, I can’t think of any other monastery in the world, or in history, come to that, where I’d rather be such a son, than in this one: Pluscarden Abbey, in the North of Scotland!
St. Benedict is our father also in that he’s our constant reference point, model, and source of authority; he’s our teacher and guide; and from heaven we believe he continues to care for us his sons with loving affection. Why has St. Benedict’s fatherhood always been so fruitful? Surely because it always refers back to, mediates, points towards the fatherhood of God, or of Christ. Benedict seeks nothing whatever for himself. His whole life was turned towards God, and he first set an example of humility and obedience, before he began to teach those things to us.
Let me just mention very briefly now three aspects of St. Benedict’s teaching, which help explain why his Rule has proved so enduring, so perennially valuable, so strong amidst all the vicissitudes of history. First: his emphasis on the priority of liturgical prayer, which is the prayer of the Church; the prayer of the scriptures; the prayer of Christ. Then secondly: his insistence on daily reading of Holy Scripture, and on our drawing spiritual nourishment primarily from that. Then thirdly, his principled stand within the tradition of the orthodox and Catholic Fathers, and the communion of the Catholic Church. As Abbot Alfred often used to say, such a tradition builds up the Church, and does not produce heresies, or aberrations of doctrine or behaviour, nor does it fall out of date, nor can it be confined to one cultural or historical setting.
“O heavenly Patron, whose name it is my glory to bear, pray for me always before God. Confirm me in faith; strengthen me in virtue; watch over and protect me in my battles, that I may win the victory over my diabolical enemy, and so deserve to gain eternal glory. Amen.”
Caelestis patrone, cuius nomine glorior, semper precare pro me apud Deum: in fide confirma; in virtute robora; in pugna tuere, ut victor de hoste maligno gloriam aeternam consequi merear. Amen.